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Farewell, Independent, and thanks for all the dictionaries..

Posted in Biographical, Crosswords, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on March 30, 2016 by telescoper

I thought I’d resume blogging activity rather gently with a short post to mark the end of an era. Both the Independent and the Independent on Sunday have ceased to exist, at least in their print editions.  It was about three years ago that I switched from the Observer to the Independent on Sunday, which involved switching from the Azed cryptic crossword to Beelzebub for my most testing weekly crossword challenge. I stopped doing the Saturday Prize Cryptic puzzle in the Saturday Guardian too, in favour of the Independent Saturday Prize crossword in the Independent which immediately paid dividends in terms of prizes!

For crossword aficianados both the Azed and Beelzebub crosswords are composed by strict adherents of the rules set by the great Ximenes and both feature grids with no black squares, in contrast to the more normal Everyman puzzle. Jonathan Crowther, who sets the Azed puzzles is the successor to Ximenes in the Observer; he’s been setting puzzles there since 1971.

Anyway, the last Independent on Sunday was published on Sunday 20th March and it included a list of the winners of the last two Beelzebub puzzles; the very final one was No. 1,358:

Beelzebub

It’s a nice way to mark the end of an era! One last dictionary to add to the collection. I’ve completely lost track of the number of books of words I’ve won from the weekly puzzles in the Independent, but it’s certainly more than 50. I’ve given many away but there’s still a large stack in Dorothy’s office.

Anyway, I spent some of my Easter weekend off doing the Guardian  prize crossword (extra-large size, but quite easy) followed by Everyman and Azed in the Observer. I guess that’s my diet from now on…

 

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Interlude

Posted in Uncategorized on March 19, 2016 by telescoper

For reasons I’d rather not go into at the moment, I’ve decided to take a break from blogging for a while. I’ll probably be back after Easter, but in the meantime there will be a short intermission.

 

 

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Women Printers

Posted in Uncategorized on March 8, 2016 by telescoper

Fascinating piece from my old college…

magdlibs's avatarMagdalene College Libraries

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2016 on the blog, we are showcasing the work of female printers of the 17th century in the Pepys Library.

In early modern England, the printing industry was not altogether a male preserve: between 1550 and 1650, it is estimated that 130 women in Britain were working actively in the printing trade. It was common for women printers to work alongside men in the printing houses of convents or with family members and spouses, and it was usual for them to marry within the trade. Amongst the books in Magdalene’s historic libraries, one can find the names of women printers on the imprints of title pages.  Some are referred to by their marital status, such as ‘Widow Sayle’ ‘Widow of J. Blageart’ and the ‘widowe of Richarde Iugge’, others, by their full names such as Alice Norton, Elizabeth Purslowe, Mary Clark and Hannah Allen.

It…

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Big Science Sunday in Brighton

Posted in Books, Talks and Reviews, Brighton, Uncategorized with tags , , on February 24, 2016 by telescoper

Just time for a spot of self-publicity. This Sunday, 28th February, is going to be Big Science Sunday at the Brighton Science Festival. This event is part of Big Science Weekend. The other part is called Big Science Saturday. On Big Science Saturday I’ll actually be working on campus at the University of Sussex for an Applicant Visit Day for prospective students, so the only part of Big Science Weekend I can participate in will be Big Science Sunday. I hope that clarifies the situation with respect to Big Science Saturday, Big Science Sunday and indeed Big Science Weekend as a whole… (Get On With It, Ed)

Anyway the reason for mentioning all this is that I will be taking part (on Big Science Sunday) in an event called Speaker’s Corner, which has been organized in collaboration with Oxford University Press, who no doubt hope that it will lead to some flogging of books. Here’s the blurb from the website:

SpeakersCorner

(Actually it will start at 2pm, in the Sallis Benney Theatre on Grand Parade so make sure you get the time right if you want to be sure that you  miss my contribution).

The theme that unites the contributors to this strange event is that they have all written books in the OUP series of Very Short Introductions. I wrote Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction. I will be preceded by John Haigh who wrote Probability: A Very Short Introduction . John Gribbin wrote Galaxies: A Very Short Introduction, but I understand he can’t come on Sunday…

John and I settled the batting order in an appropriate fashion, via the tossing of a coin, and have agreed that we will both do our turns without any fancy graphics or computer malarky, in the manner of a couple of ageing buskers. I hope people attending this event will feel free to ask questions as we go along to make it as informal and interactive as possible.

So if you’re in the Brighton area on Big Science Sunday as opposed to Big Science Saturday do come along!

P.S. A new edition of Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction will be out later this year so we’ll be flogging off copies of the old edition at a heavily discounted price…

 

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The EU Referendum last time around (1975)

Posted in Uncategorized on February 20, 2016 by telescoper

Do you remember the last time we had a referendum on Europe, in 1975? I do. Most Tories were vociferously in favour then. I was only 12 so couldn’t vote, but I would have voted No then largely on the grounds that Ted Heath had taken us in without bothering to consult. Now, 40 years on, I have grown up a bit and I am convinced that on balance our membership of the EU is a good thing for Britain and to leave now would jeopardise our economic and social wellbeing.

kmflett's avatarKmflett's Blog

The EU Referendum last time around (1975)

Thatcher 9 April 1975

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The Wilson Government’s Referendum on Britain’s EU membership was held 41 years ago on 5th June 1975. Given that Britain is set to have a further Referendum on the matter June 23rd you might think that the 1975 Referendum would be of some media note. However the media continues to be very bad at history. It requires things like research and fact checking, not matters there are big in the 2016 media not least because of resources.

The result in case (most likely) you are too young to remember or have simply forgotten was a fairly decisive vote to stay in the EU. The idea of a Referendum had been developed at least in part by Tony Benn. He saw it as a way in general of extending popular participation in politics and also specifically a way of getting round deep ‘no’…

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Mathematics at Sussex – The Videos

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on February 16, 2016 by telescoper

A while ago I posted some videos featuring students in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Sussex. Here are a few more about the other side of the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, i.e. the Department of Mathematics. The first is a general video about the Mathematics BSc programme generally and the other two feature current students (one undergraduate, one postgraduate) talking about their courses and the environment for students here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Feynman Diagrams for Beginners

Posted in Uncategorized on February 15, 2016 by telescoper

And now for something completely different. I noticed on the arXiv a recent post with the following abstract:

We give a short introduction to Feynman diagrams, with many exercises. Text is targeted at students who had little or no prior exposure to quantum field theory. We present condensed description of single-particle Dirac equation, free quantum fields and construction of Feynman amplitude using Feynman diagrams. As an example, we give a detailed calculation of cross-section for annihilation of electron and positron into a muon pair. We also show how such calculations are done with the aid of computer.

The paper is indeed very nice and I recommend it to students everywhere. I had to teach myself what quantum field theory I know (which isn’t much) and I certainly wish I’d had an introduction like this to work through the examples!

In elementary courses on elementary particles Feynman diagrams are often presented as mere “cartoons” illustrating particular scattering or other processes, and they can play that role very usefully, but they are actually much more than that: they provide a neat and potentially very powerful way of doing real calculations.

Anyway, here’s an illustration:

Feynman

 

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Advance Thoughts on LIGO

Posted in Uncategorized on February 11, 2016 by telescoper

By way of a warm-up to this afternoon’s announcement, here are some thoughts by another physicist…

Matt Strassler's avatarOf Particular Significance

Scarcely a hundred years after Einstein revealed the equations for his theory of gravity (“General Relativity”) on November 25th, 1915, the world today awaits an announcement from the LIGO experiment, where the G in LIGO stands for Gravity. (The full acronym stands for “Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory.”) As you’ve surely heard, the widely reported rumors are that at some point in the last few months, LIGO, recently upgraded to its “Advanced” version, finally observed gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space (more accurately, of space-time). These waves, which can make the length of LIGO shorter and longer by an incredibly tiny amount, seem to have come from the violent merger of two black holes, each with a mass [rest-mass!] dozens of times larger than the Sun. Their coalescence occurred long long ago (billions of years) in a galaxy far far away (a good fraction of the distance…

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On Religion

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on February 3, 2016 by telescoper

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Defining Sexual Harassment

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on January 25, 2016 by telescoper

Since I spent this morning at a training session about preventing bullying and harassment in the workplace, and after the latest high-profile sexual harassment case at Caltech I thought it might be useful to share my current employer’s definition of what may constitute sexual harassment in the workplace. In my earlier post on harassment I talked mainly about the processes that take place when it is alleged, but I didn’t include a clear statement of how sexual harassment is defined.

The following is taken from the University of Sussex’s Policy to Prevent Bullying and Harassment at Work (which is in the public domain):

Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination and involves unwanted and unwelcome attention of a sexual nature. This may be physical or verbal or involve the denigration of an individual on sexual grounds or by sexual means. Some examples of sexual harassment are:

  • indecent assault
  • deliberate physical contact to which the individual has not consented or had the opportunity to object to
  • offensive or derogatory language alluding to a person’s private life or sexual behaviour or orientation by innuendo, jokes or remarks
  •  provocative suggestions
  • pressing an individual to accept unwelcome invitations
  • the display of suggestive or pornographic material
  • unwelcome repeated telephone calls, letters or emails
These examples should not be seen as exhaustive: any unwelcome behaviour of a sexual nature which creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment for the recipient may be regarded as sexual harassment.

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